Digital broadband broadcast networks enable end users to receive digital content including video, audio, data, and so forth. Using a mobile terminal, a user may receive digital content over a wireless digital broadcast network. Digital content can be transmitted in a cell within a network. A cell may represent a geographical area that may be covered by a transmitter in a communication network. A network may have multiple cells, and cells may be adjacent to other cells.
A receiver device, such as a mobile terminal, may receive a program or service in a data or transport stream. The transport stream carries individual elements of the program or service such as the audio, video, and data components of a program or service. Typically, the receiver device locates the different components of a particular program or service in a data stream through Program Specific Information (PSI) or Service Information (SI) embedded in the data stream. However, PSI or SI signalling may be insufficient in some wireless communications systems, such as Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld (DVB-H) systems. Use of PSI or SI signalling in such systems may result in a sub-optimal end user experience as the PSI and SI tables carrying in PSI and SI information may have long repetition periods. In addition, PSI or SI signalling requires a relatively large amount of bandwidth which is costly and also decreases efficiency of the system.
In certain digital video broadcast systems (e.g., DVB-T2, enhanced Digital Video Broadcast Terrestrial), it may be desirable to map network specific parameters with the Time Frequency Slicing (TFS) structure. Due to the physical layer structure of such digital video broadcast systems, transport stream identification may be redundant. Instead, identification of a TFS group, which is a combination of one or more frequencies carrying one or more PLPs (Physical Layer Pipes), may be desirable.
In DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcast Terrestrial), the Network Information Table (NIT) may be used mainly for mapping transport streams with modulation parameters and with geographical coverage area of each signal carrying the transport streams. Also, some other information may be provided by NIT, such as, network name.
Certain DVB systems may map between modulation parameters and transport streams. A transport stream carried within such systems may no longer be referenced with a single set of modulation parameters. Instead, each PLP may have, e.g., different modulation (i.e. constellation) and coding (i.e. code rate) and may carry several transport streams. Hence, a conventional terrestrial-delivery-system descriptor would not be sufficient for such DVB systems. Also, a conventional cell-frequency-link descriptor is not optimized for such a DVB system, since it is lacking a loop for the frequencies and hence would result in unnecessary overhead.
Further, there is no provision in the current PSI/SI (Program Specific Information/Service information) for mapping each TFS group with the network parameters, such as cells and their location.
As such, improved techniques for mapping network-specific parameters with the TFS structure would advance the art.